One of my favorite rom-coms from the 90s is Mickey Blue Eyes, and one of my favorite scenes is when Gina tells Michael about the name of her family’s restaurant. It goes something like this:
Gina: It’s called “The La Trattoria.”
Michael: You mean “La Trattoria.”
Gina: No.
Michael: “The La Trattoria” means “The The Trattoria.”
I realize that explaining a joke doesn’t help with the humor, but, for the sake of this post, it’s worth noting that this makes sense because most English-speakers are familiar with the fact that “la” means “the” in French, Spanish, and Italian.
The reason that I bring this up is because I ran into something very similar while translating the Icelandic place names in Journey to the Center of the Earth, but with one key difference. The difference is, of course, that most people outside of Iceland are not familiar with the Icelandic language or geography.
The first example of this is the name of the volcano, Snæfellsjökul. Verne renders it as two words in French, and sometimes refers to it simply as Snæfells. This latter usage is incorrect, since snæfell is itself a compound term that means “snowy fell” — with “fell” being a Nordic term to describe a peak that is tall enough to be above the tree line. Fell can also be used to describe the region of alpine tundra near the summit.
Jökull, on the other hand, is a term that is used to describe a volcanic crater, and due to how common these are in Iceland, many mountains there have names with this suffix. The meaning then is something like “snowy fell crater,” but, ironically, the name Snæfellsjökull is at least somewhat recognizable due to the popularity of this book.
However, things get tricky when translating the name of the peninsula where Snæfellsjökull is located. It is called Snæfellness. The suffix “-ness” refers to a type of peninsula in Icelandic. The difficulty here is that without some context, few people outside of Iceland would realize that Snæfellness is a peninsula, as opposed to a mountain, town, bay, or any number of other things.
There is a similar conundrum with the term Reykjaness that occurs earlier in the book. In this case, Verne actually refers to it as le cap Reykjaness, and based on this I chose to translate it as “the Reykjaness peninsula.” In the same manner, I refer to Snæfellness as “the Snæfellness peninsula.”
This brings us full-circle to the scene from Mickey Blue Eyes, since these translations are essentially like saying “the Reykja peninsula peninsula” or “the Snæfell peninsula peninsula.” You may wonder why I would translate something in redundant manner like that.
The answer is that I wanted, as much as possible, for a casual reader to be able to understand what was going on without including footnotes. If you read my translation of Around the World in Eighty Days, you may have noticed that it contained no footnotes and no introduction — I wanted readers to be able to focus on Verne’s story rather than my commentary. Adding “peninsula” to clarify allows readers to understand what is going on without setting the book down to look up the name. And since few Americans are familiar with Icelandic, it’s unlikely that anyone will notice the redundancy.
I also chose to leave the full name intact, rather than changing it to something like “Snæfells peninsula” in order to allow curious readers to search online for more information. Unless there is a specific historical reason to do otherwise, I’ve always tried to use the full modern names for places to facilitate this. Interestingly, in this case many travel blogs seem to follow the same convention.
I could ramble on for some time about this last point. The place names in Verne’s novels present a lot of unique challenges from a translational standpoint. What I’ve outlined above is one one of many decisions that I’ve had to make in how to render these stories in a way that is understandable to modern American readers. I talked a little bit about this in my “About the Translation” post for Around the World in Eighty Days, and I’ll follow up with some additional posts about other interesting translational puzzles, or quirks of Verne’s writing.